Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [18]
2. While the blender is running, add the vegetable oil in a very slow and steady drizzle. Whip until thick. Store in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.
Makes 1½ cups
Like factory-raised birds, backyard chickens can become infected with salmonella, the bacteria that sickened 1,600 Americans and led to the recall of a half billion eggs in 2010. But salmonella is relatively rare among hens raised in clean conditions with room to range. I’m not going to say you’d want to eat off the floor of our henhouse, or even in its vicinity, but you will find no eight-foot piles of manure crawling with mice and maggots such as inspectors found in the offending factory farms. You can feel considerably more confident serving dishes made with raw eggs, such as mayonnaise, when those eggs come from your backyard.
MILK MAYONNAISE
If you don’t want to consume raw eggs, try this dreamy sauce from David Leite’s The New Portuguese Table.
⅓ cup cold whole milk
¾ teaspoon fresh lemon juice
1 small garlic clove, minced
⅛ teaspoon freshly ground white pepper
½ cup neutral vegetable oil
¼ cup olive oil
Kosher salt
1. Combine the milk, lemon juice, garlic, and pepper in a small bowl (if you’re using an immersion blender or a whisk), or in a standing blender. Blend until frothy.
2. With the blender running or whisking constantly, in a very slow, steady drizzle add the oils and beat until, as Leite puts it, “the mixture thickens lusciously.” Salt to taste. Keeps tightly covered in the refrigerator for up to a week.
Makes about 1 cup
EGGNOG
With backyard eggs, you can serve homemade eggnog at a holiday party with almost complete confidence that you won’t make anyone sick—from salmonella, anyway. Because drink enough homemade eggnog, and the race is on between heart failure and liver disease, unless a stroke fells you first. But life is short. Especially if you drink eggnog. When we throw a Christmas party, which we do once every decade, I pull out my grandmother’s purple cut-glass punch bowl and fill it with this alcoholic eggnog. Then I open a square box of store-bought vanilla ice cream—trying to preserve the boxy shape—and drop it into the middle of the bowl of nog, where it both looks and functions like a giant ice cube. (Homemade ice cream is better, but it doesn’t come shaped like an ice cube.) The next morning, use the leftovers to make eggnog French toast.
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: A production, but festive
Cost comparison: Tricky to price, but basically a draw. If you subtract liquor from the equation, homemade costs about $1.50 per quart—except a lot of that is air. If you try to squeeze the air out of the equation as well, homemade costs just over $3.00 per quart. Our local market last holiday season sold eggnog for $3.00 per quart. But it wasn’t nearly as good.
6 large eggs, separated
1 cup sugar
1 to 1½ cups bourbon (start with the smaller quantity, taste, and see what you think)
1 to 1½ cups rum (see bourbon)
2 cups whole milk
2 cups heavy cream
Lots of freshly grated nutmeg
A box of vanilla ice cream (optional)
1. In a large bowl, beat the egg yolks until bright yellow. Add the sugar and beat until smooth. Stir in the bourbon, rum, and milk, scraping the sides of the bowl.
2. In another bowl, beat the cream until it forms soft peaks. Fold this into the eggnog.
3. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold this into the eggnog.
4. Pour the eggnog into a punch bowl—it should be able to hold about 2 gallons. Sprinkle generously with nutmeg. If you want, float a brick of vanilla ice cream in the eggnog.
Makes about 1½ gallons
EGGNOG FRENCH TOAST
To make eggnog French toast, pour leftover eggnog into a shallow pan and soak a few slices of bread for 5 minutes. Fry in hot butter until browned on both sides.
CHAPTER 3
BREAKFAST
Sometimes it seems that food fads have